Apeman

To note the recent death of Paul Ehrlich, it seemed appropriate to reference Apeman, a song from The Kinks 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Go Round, Part One (for my ridiculously compulsive exploration of a little known period in The Kinks discography read Kinkdom).  It was the lyrics in the first two verses that made me think of Ehrlich and gave me an excuse to show the band playing the entire song.

I think I'm sophisticated
'Cause I'm living my life
Like a good homo sapiens
But all around me
Everybody's multiplying
And they're walking round like flies, man
So I'm no better than the animals
Sitting in the cages in the zoo, man
'Cause compared to the flowers
And the birds and the trees
I am an apeman

 

I think I'm so educated
And I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
And with the over population
And inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore
And make like an apeman

 

The Population Bomb, Ehrlich's enormous best seller, was published in 1968, a book in which he predicted mass famine by the end of the 1970s and global environmental deterioration.  He had a distinguished academic career at Stanford University and received countless awards and recognition over the decades for his work.

 

The problem is that Ehrlich was wrong, incredibly wrong, but it never seemed to impair his academic credibility.  I read The Population Bomb during my freshman year of college (1969-70) and, in my naivete, was impressed with his thesis, though even at the time, found some of his language overwrought.  By the end of the 70s it was clear to me Ehrlich was wrong and became baffled by the continuing respect accorded him and those who adopted his views.

 

The most dramatic evidence of Ehrlich's wrongness was his 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon, summarized by Wikipedia:

The economist Julian Simon argued in 1980 that overpopulation is not a problem as such and that humanity will adapt to changing conditions. Simon argued that eventually human creativity will improve living standards, and that most resources were replaceable.^[50] Simon stated that over hundreds of years, the prices of virtually all commodities had decreased significantly and persistently.^[51] Ehrlich termed Simon the proponent of a "space-age cargo cult" of economists convinced that human creativity and ingenuity would create substitutes for scarce resources and reasserted the idea that population growth was outstripping the Earth's supplies of food, fresh water and minerals.^[8]

This exchange resulted in the Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for resources during a ten-year period that was made with Simon in 1980.^[8] Ehrlich was allowed to choose ten commodities that he predicted would become scarce and thus increase in price. Ehrlich chose mostly metals, and lost the bet, as their average price decreased by about 30% in the next 10 years.

Ehrlich's prognostication failings reminds me of the quote attributed to Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli after reviewing the paper of a young physicist, "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong". 

I never met Ehrlich but did have the opportunity to sit with one of his acolytes (they'd co-authored papers and was involved in setting up the Ehrlich-Simon bet), Paul Holdren, at a small dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2008.  Like his mentor, Holdren has had a distinguished academic career with positions at Harvard and Berkeley and receiving a MacArthur Foundation "genius" Fellowship.  In 2009, President Obama appointed Holdren as his chief science advisor and director of the White House's Office of Science & Technology, a role he served in both of Obama's administrations.

While I don't remember most of the details of the dinner discussion, my overall impression was Holdren fit the pattern found in Harvard academics in encounters during my twelve years working in Cambridge and, for a decade after, being a frequent visitor; they tended to be close-minded, provincial, and intolerant of dissenting opinions, not something I would have predicted when I began working in the city in 1980. Most found it incomprehensible that anyone would disagree with their political opinions or general thoughts on the world out of anything other than ignorance and/or bigotry, and automatically devalued the views of anyone lacking the "right" credentials.  

In the wake of Ehrlich's death I came across a tweet he'd sent on January 3, 2023 after a 60 Minutes appearance, which explains how he and Holdren maintained their academic reputations. It is quite an indictment of academia:

"60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor." 

Notice one of the tactics he, and many other academics, employs is to call any criticism "right-wing" thus casting those criticizing him into the outer darkness where the substance of the criticism can be completely disregarded.  The funny thing is I came across the quote in a tweet from Roger Pielke Jr, a traditional liberal and critic of Ehrlich.  Pielke wrote a longer piece, Gravediggers of Science, on Ehrlich in his substack, relating his encounter with Ehrlich in 2010, in which Ehrlich and the scurrilous climate scientist Michael Mann engaged in their favorite smearing tactic and making completely false allegations.

Ehrlich and others employ these tactics because in the circles they swim in it works.  There is no price to pay for being wrong or for trying to destroy others with false innuendo and worse.  In fact, they are rewarded for doing so. 

Rereading The Population Bomb and some of Ehrlich's other work one is struck by what a miserable and misanthropic view of humanity he holds.(1)  It probably explains his desire of widespread sterilization and a powerful world government to enforce his views.

I'll give the last word to this summary from The Free Press.  They are unfortunately correct that his worldview has infected society:

Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to economist and professional eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.

Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.

Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.

Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.

Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully, they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.

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(1)  In that regard, Ehrlich reminds me of the leaders of the AI crowd.  Though Ehrlich preached scarcity and the AI dudes abundance, at heart they are all anti-humanists.  If AI can perform better than humans, of what use are people?  The AI leaders have clearly said this and don't care about the implications.  In February 2025 I summarized Elon Musk's worldview but it can be said for all of the AI proponents:

Musk and a small group of "creatives" run society, with robots operating our factories, and AI, using Musk-designed algorithms, running everything else.  Enough wealth is created to fund a Universal Basic Income for the rest of Americans, who live in a ketamine and cannabis induced haze.